Callout Improvements

[Anonymous]

The Callout tool is a great advancement and incredibly useful, however there are a few things that could use some more work.

1. The callout tag really should be editable so the text can be controlled if you wish. When you have a long file name this text can be very long (see Image 1)
2. If possible there could be a way to put the callout output on a separate sheet to the selected callout and tag as well as keeping the same reference numbers. That sounds confusing so imagine on dwg 1 you have all your elevations and on dwg 2 you have all your details. I do this manually now and is common practice. We can move detail views from one drawing to another so why not callout views.
3. We can edit the text in the callout output, can this be then carried over to the main callout tag. Since the callout is on the same drawing usually we just put a dash in the dwg no. location, I can do this on the callout but not on the tag.

Thanks.

[acbsdesign]

grinvent,

I submitted this, someone from dev. even said "such a small thing"....

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/advance-steel-ideas/2018-version-please-fix-text-alignment-in-call-ou...

[Anonymous]

Not the same thing as I am asking. I want to have control of the input that is in the callout boxes whereas you are asking about the alignment of the text which can be fixed by modifying the callout drawing (CalloutTemplate.dwg and CalloutViewTitleTemplate.dwg) in the shared/ support/ symbols folder which is quite simple to do hence the developers comment.

Hope this helps.

Gary

[acbsdesign]

Yes, I know where the two dwg files are and how to modify them,

However, I don't think this has to be done by each user if it can be done by the dev team from the beginning. 

It looks crappy and amateurish.

There was another discussion about sending views to a different dwg, it was put 'on hold'.

[Drawtech]

I agree with the comments.

It's a good start but why not do it properly the first time?

• The text in the 2 template files should be correctly aligned centre to start with for good presentation and not have to be edited.
• Since they do need editing, it would be good if you could give the template files a different name and select the required one in MT defaults like with weld symbols.  Then user changes can be migrated to new version like with weld symbols.
• The method of call off is an industry standard with the detail number/letter and drawing number reference for the relative callout label or view title, but this is rather redundant since you cannot currently have the views on a different drawing!!  ...for future hopefully!
• ...and as above comments, if on the same drawing (which they will always be for the time being at least), the drawing number reference would be omitted on both call out label and view title.
• when using a circle for the label (probably preferred by most?) it would be nice if when moving the label text it kept pointing to the nearest point on the circle (i.e. stays on the radial line).

[Drawtech]

Having player around with the templates, when setting the attribute justification to centre and aligning it where I want it (central in the circle) the results are not as desired.

I think this is because AutoCAD is justifying the attribute value itself (e.g. %CalloutViewNumber) to centre before AS swaps it for the text string, which then is positioned where the "%" starts - hence it is way off.  I think this issue needs to be dealt with in the code rather than in the template dwg file.

Unless the centre alignment is made usable it is never going to look dead centre due to different character widths & text strings.

If I am wrong about this and someone had managed to justify the call out view number and drawing number dead centre no matter the text string, then please enlighten me 🙂

[Anonymous]

This is the reason why nothing gets through to the developers about the things we need improved in AS. Lots of comments and only 1 vote. I don't care about the votes personally but the developers work on interest from the users. Vote these ideas up and they will take our comments on board.

[Drawtech]

@Anonymous you are quite correct - I thought I had already voted it up but clearly had not.  I have now! 🙂

...and for the developers, a few other observations on things to be improved:

• overview/GA drawings with more than one main view (quite normal):
  • The call out view numbers are indexed to the view they are created from and not the whole drawing.  ...so if you create call out views from multiple main views you get duplicate call out view numbers.
• It would be useful if any changes made to the call out view title (TL,TR,BL,BR values) were reflected in the call out label.  Then you could easily edit the call out view number or other things.
• The existing function "renumber cut views" is also applying to the new call out views.  There may well be times when you want to renumber the cut views but not the call out views (or vice versa) so a separate function for each would be more useful.  This thought comes mainly from the above restriction of the call out view numbering indexed to main view and not whole drawing - you might delete some of the first created call out views from one of the main views so as not to have duplicate view numbers.  ...but then if you wanted to renumber any cut views it would also update the call out view numbers and you would end up with duplicates again.

[Anonymous]

It would be nice to have a option delete horizontal line from CalloutViewTitleTemplate.dwg for the case I want only texts. If I delete it, line is created automaticaly again.

[Anonymous]

Generally updating it.. being able to select the template that it's generated from and have it update on the drawing even if the templates are update after the callout view has been created.

[Anonymous]

It's 2019 and it still looks like crap..

[brettbarkman]

Still out of whack in 2020.  I tried changing the Justify property for each attribute in the template but doing that throws it even more out of whack when you create the callout on a drawing.